Creepers gonna creep

So I finished Portal 2 last night. Well, the single player anyway.

So very, very much love for this game and this series. Portal was great, and Portal 2 manages to be even better in some truly spectacular ways. And while I feel like the ending is pretty conclusive... I didn't see how they could make a sequel after the first one, either. So we'll see. I would be satisfied if it ended here, but how can I not want more?

Favorite random trivia bit from the Half-Life wiki: apparently Valve originally intended for Wheatley to be voiced by Richard Ayoade, but decided Stephen Merchant fit better. And while I think I agree... just the very thought of Richard Ayoade in a Portal game is so freaking amazing that I hope they find a role for him somewhere one of these days.

As a heads-up to all of you who don't already know, I will be doing my usual summer disappearing trick as of this coming Sunday, and will be between various isolated places in Oregon while I train new banding interns. And so as always, I will be semi-difficult to reach until sometime in August, but I will do my best to check my phone and email when I have service.

(This probably goes without saying, but spoilers are in the comments.)

Quite literally, might I say. ( But first, a quick recap. )

My goodness, how has it been three weeks since I did a real Saipan-related update? When you're on a ten-day week, and busy for much of it, time slips right by. Well, I can't possibly recap everything that's happened, but here are some highlights:

( Be forewarned, this one's long. )

It's been a crazy couple of days, or I would have updated sooner. We started banding on Wednesday, and so between that and getting to know the area and the sites we missed out on banding at, and a million other little things to do, we've been pretty busy.

( But I'll attempt to recap. )

It is currently 7 AM on Tuesday, lol. We got in last night after a freaking two-hour delay in Honolulu because some sort of engine temperature indicator light had gone wrong, and it took that long for them to fix it and fill out all the requisite paperwork and test it. As a result we had to run to our gate in Guam, but luckily they let all of us with connecting flights skip immigration so we didn't delay anyone too badly. We caught our little island-hopper turboprop to Saipan just fine, and managed not to pass out on the ride to the house despite both of us having been awake for 24 hours at that point, aside from a couple of crappy airplane naps.

BUT. Now I am here and I have slept and it's humid and 80 degrees and lovely. Currently we share the house with Caroline and Nathan, the previous MAPS banding crew who fly out on the 9th, and Emily, a plant crew intern from University of Washington. The plant people apparently go in and out a lot and I'm not sure how many there ever are, but the banding crew is just me and Daniel, much like last year when it was generally just me and Aaron.

So we get today off because we needed a chance to recuperate a little before heading right into banding, but this afternoon we get to go tour around a little and go get our local driver's licenses apparently. So that'll be a cool souvenir.

( My backyard, let me show you it. )

As of today I am officially hired for summer, woohoo! Enough of this crappy "job" at Dick's that hasn't given me hours in six weeks (I've been working at my dad's place in the meantime again). Come mid- to late-April sometime, exact date TBA, I'll be leaving for San Francisco for a quick MAPS training session, which will largely be review as I worked for them last summer as many of you will recall, and then April 28th-ish I'll be off to Saipan! I'll admit to my ignorance here; before applying for this job, I didn't know the US held the Northern Marianas Islands as a commonwealth. I knew we had the Marshall Islands, and Guam, of course, but directly north of Guam is a volcanic island chain that apparently belongs to us as well, which we claimed from Japan in WWII or something. So I'll be over there all summer long, banding birds, enjoying a culture totally different from good ol' Cascadia, and lounging about on the beach eating coconuts and papayas. When I return depends on if I get in to Boise State or not - if I do, I'll be back in September sometime, otherwise I'm going to stay as long as I can, which probably will just mean mid-October.

There is no cell phone coverage on the island, which means that while I'll have a landline phone number, anyone who calls that number from a cell phone will be charged as if you were dialing an international number. But have no fear, you should all be able to contact me easily enough via the internet, as the house we'll be staying in has wireless. Handy! And this means I don't have to take the usual extended RP hiatus I was fearing. It also means I won't have to wait until returning to the mainland to watch the new season of RvB! These are both very good things.

I'll do my usual temporary address post when I get it, in case anyone wants to send me anything. Which I encourage you to do, just for fun, if you feel like it. It'll take about 5 days for anything to get to Saipan, but hey, you don't have to pay international postage! So that's convenient.

I will, of course, have to release Penny before I go. Sad, but I'd planned on that happening anyway, as if I wasn't going to Saipan, I'd be going somewhere else. Hopefully she'll find a mate and have lots of adorable squeaky fluff-headed babies. ;D I'll just have to catch another when I get back.

So. I'M BACK. FOR... well, probably not for good. But at least for a good long while. That's sort of like for good, right?

And might I say that I am very disappointed in you right now, PDX. Man, I come back hoping for sun and warm weather, but it was like 70 and cloudy the whole way. That's right, Portland has the same weather as the freaking coast right now. I know the heat wave sucked, but I was glad to be here for a few days in the middle of it. Hopefully it will get warm and sunny again soon. This sort of weather isn't supposed to be regular until at least September. :/

Anyway, now that the internet and I are acquainted once more, expect updates on Aphelion soon. That's right, coming soon to an internet near you, the long-awaited RP of mystery and intrigue and asteroid colonization that Angela and I have been planning for... a long time. I'm excited. I hope all of you are as well!

Related to this is that I need help testing my new character, so go talk to him if you want to. I can't say he'll be appreciative of the attention but that's too bad.

Oh, and beware spoilers in advance. He's pre-Reconstruction but I can't guarantee the content of comments to come. And there are some things in that show that one really should not be spoiled for.

While listening to Gomez' How We Operate the other day, I realized that Girlshapedlovedrug is so very ridiculously Church/Tex, and that that is awesome. And what? A canon pairing that is not actually complete crap? Oh, RoosterTeeth, you spoil us so.

Except for when you don't, like doing a PSA this week instead of continuing from the asldkfalghag cliffhanger. Although fire safety is very important, I know.

Anyway. Last weekend, I went to Crater Lake! It was excellent. We hiked up to the tallest point in the park (the fire lookout tower on Mt. Scott), and there were so many butterflies up there it was insane. Not floating about and sitting on flowers, but instead whipping around in great colorful currents like a kind of living, visible wind. It was so cool. And then we hiked down to the lowest point, the lake itself, and got freezing cold in the perpetually-38-degrees water. Which was awesome. And then we hiked out into the backcountry through subalpine forests and meadows of lupines and camped at Dutton Creek, which was nice but full of mosquitoes. Still, we all agreed that it was safe to say we conquered that National Park in our measly 3 days there. It was great.

And this coming weekend (well, okay, my weekends don't always line up with the rest of the world's, so by weekend I mean Sunday through Wednesday) I will be in Portland again! Assuming it doesn't rain on us a bunch here and make us lose our days off, anyway. That would be annoying. And then, of course, I'll be back for good by August 8th. Possibly the 7th. It will depend on the weather, as usual.

In awesome bird news, we caught a cedar waxwing today! Totally awesome and so unexpected. Not as cool as the hawk, but still great. A nice little break from the epic amounts of juvenile Wilson's warblers that have been flooding the nets. Today's site usually gets about 18 birds a day and yet we got 33 because all the juveniles have fledged and are roaming about in nomadic packs. It's kind of fun, but it's a lot of work.

Alright, time to go make some dinner and watch more BSG. That is one heck of an addicting show. :)

Oh RvB. Such a tease. I swear, it's worse than, I dunno, Lost. Okay, so I never actually watched Lost. But just based on what I've heard, you have this show where every 45-minute episode ends at a crazy cliffhanger... or you have a show with 5-minute episodes that does exactly the same thing. AAGH. FLAIL. Some of you out there need to catch up so we can flail together before I start giving in and spazzing about OMG HUEG SPOILARZ GO HERE.

So anyway, yeah, I disappeared even more than usual for a couple days last week as Aaron (banding partner) and I went on an epic three-day camping trip to Malheur/Steens/high desert. Freaking awesome. I have pictures but I haven't really gone through and made them nice for posting yet. I'll do that eventually.

In falconry news, Curtis is going to fly a kestrel this season! I'll miss Phoenix (and I'm sure he will too, woe) but there just aren't enough rabbits up here for her. I think she's moving to Corvallis. So Curtis and Wayne and I will go on a super kestrel trapping adventure sometime this August~ And it will be awesome.

Tomorrow we head back to the site where we caught that hawk last week. I hope we get it again. And then after that we are ditching to Newport to go see Harry Potter. Bwahaha.

Ten days until the Boosh hit America. Sob.

Edit: I always think of things to add after I post, fff. Okay, so I was looking through my flickr posts, and while most of my photos have the expected low number of views, I think some insect fanatics have been spam-clicking some of the pics or something, haha. My shots of the termite mounds and the green scarab beetles have over 100 views each, and my most-viewed photo is the giant centipede with 272 views. wtf, random people. wtf.

Stolen from zolac_no_miko

Your result for Roleplayer Test! ...
The Biographer

Plotful, Character-Oriented, Platonic
Like the Portraitist, the development of your character is the most important thing to you when you roleplay. However, you like your development and relationships to have some kind of overarching plot: you're not the type to enjoy a dressing room or any kind of roleplay where your character can't grow in at least a semi-structured manner. You enjoy exploring your character's psyche, but simple exploration isn't enough: you like to discover and then implement and use, and therefore continuity (which gives you "why"s and "how"s) is very important to you. You struggle when your character has no solid base in which to put down its roots, such as in games where there isn't enough structure or ones where the plot is continually changing.

Take this quiz! @ HelloQuizzy

In other news, on Sunday, in addition to the usual thrushes and warblers and wrens, we caught a Coopers Hawk. This bird has been hanging out at Beaver Ridge for the past several weeks, molting from its juvenile feathers into its adult plumage, and finally it wound up in one of our nets. Which, I have to say, was freaking awesome. Coming up the hill and seeing a hawk flailing around in a net is such an incredible surprise.

( Photos ahoy )

Ten RP icons completed for Church already. I am a sad individual.